by JL Bryan
"Nicholas, acquaintance, we need a couple of things to wrap up this case. Starting with two ghost stampers."
"Then go by the office and pick them up at your leisure. Your key still works at the moment. Doesn't it?"
"I'd rather have them delivered," I said. "By you. It would help keep that thing quiet from Kara." I waited for a response, but didn't get one. "You know. That thing. Quiet from Kara. Remember? You wanted me to set aside this ghost just for you—"
"Yes, yes, fine. If you need assistance on this capture, Hayden and I will be happy to be on-site."
"Wait, nobody invited Hayden—"
"He is the technical supervisor on the case. And I'm not carrying all those stampers for you like a pack mule, Eleanor."
"Don't call me that. Ever. Also, when I was at your lab in North Carolina, I saw some experimental gear that's supposed to help ghosts manifest. Force them to, even. Negative ion pump, EM field generator..."
"Yes. What about them?"
"Have you got a field version of that?"
"It's only prototypical, Ellie."
"So that's a yes? You have one? In town? Maybe there at the office?"
"We...may have. I'll check with Hayden. But it's not something that we actually use, Ellie. If we have it here at all, it's experimental. I'm not sure I can sign off on that."
"Bring it along with the stampers," I said. "I want it all here at the client's by sunset. I'll text you if I need anything else."
"Now, let's not forget that I am the supervising investigator on this case—"
"How could I ever forget? See you tonight, Nicholas."
"All done?" Stacey asked from where she lay on a wooden lounger.
"Not quite," I said. "Let's go grab every trap in the van, and any of those clamshell attachments. They're better than nothing. We have a few more things to set up inside."
Stacey groaned. We were both eager to get away from the house and grab a nice day's sleep before tonight's confrontation with the ghosts in the house, but I wanted everything set up before Nicholas arrived and started sticking his nose around.
We tested out one of the clamshell devices, which are generally so slow that we usually don't even bother with them. I wanted an array of traps set up this time, though.
Stacey, tech manager that she was, stood one of the cylindrical ghost traps on end. She affixed the clamshell device to the outside of the trap and set it to close.
While she did this, I supervised her and also ate a small bag of Wise white cheddar popcorn at the same time, because I'm good at multitasking.
"Okay, testy, testy," Stacey said. She pressed a remote control in her palm, and the hinged attachment swung the ghost trap lid into place. Slowly. Then it pressed the lid down, sealing the trap airtight and pressing together the metal mesh connectors to create an electromagnetic ghost-containment field. Slowly.
"I got nine seconds," Stacey said. "From click to sealed."
"It's better than nothing." I tossed the crumpled popcorn bag into a colorful plastic wastebasket ringed with happy-looking giraffes and elephants.
"Is it, though? Do we really want to depend on these?"
"Don't worry. Nicholas and the Hoff are still bringing the big stampers. Unfortunately, it also means they're bringing themselves."
"I hope they don't trip us up."
"It's okay. I have plans for them."
Stacey punched the remote for another clamshell, and I watched the lid of another trap swing...slowly...closed.
"It's okay," Stacey said. "Maybe the ghost will be sleepy and looking for a place to nap."
"Maybe so."
After a bit more work and testing each item of gear, I declared we were done and could finally leave.
We each went home to eat, sleep, change clothes, and generally prepare for a dangerous night of fighting against the dead. And putting up with our new, unwanted co-workers.
I had barely spoken to Calvin in days. He was packing up, making his last preparations to leave, hardly even aware of our current case, though he had made some effort to see if he could find a connection between Anton Clay and the property where Mackenzie's house stood. So far, it was looking unlikely that we would find one.
I sat on my bed with my tablet and checked through footage we'd collected from the boarded-up gas station and the old theater. Stacey and I stopped by both locations in the darkness just before sunrise, on our way to the nursing home, and luckily we hadn't had any encounters of either the ghostly or law-enforcement kind.
The theater footage had a lot of strange shadows to offer, but no glimpses of Anton Clay or any other clear apparition. I noticed a temporary, unexplained warm spot in the old gas station, but that was about it. If Clay was in either place, he was certainly keeping his profile low. Subterranean, even.
I reclined on the bed, and my cat came over and helpfully plonked himself down on my chest and poked his whiskers into my nose. I didn't think I would sleep, because my mind kept spinning, going over my plans for the night, and all my fears, which is a list too long to fully recount here. Also, as mentioned, cat whiskers in my nose.
I suppose it was lucky the nursery ghost had sucked energy out of me, because I did manage to zonk out eventually. It was an uneasy sleep. The nursery ghost sang her lullaby, rocking a skeletal baby in a creaky old bassinet. Then I dreamed Michael was dead and I had to attend his funeral, where the fire department laid him on a heap of deadwood and set it ablaze. The lullaby continued throughout.
"It's a shame, but these things must happen," said a man beside me at the funeral. His long blond hair was pulled back with a strand of black silk. He wore a long, richly embroidered coat with tails and matching vest, dressed like an antebellum plantation owner who liked to flash his wealth. "Fire is a cleansing element. It brings purity. And clarity. Don't you agree?" He sipped dark wine from a cut crystal glass.
A four-piece string band played, and servants in livery drifted through the funeral crowd, offering drinks and appetizers while Michael's body burned. The crowd chatted, looking lively. Some of them paired off and began to dance among the gravestones.
"It's you," I said to the young blond man. "Anton Clay."
"I thought that was obvious. You look lovely, Eleanor."
I looked down to see myself in a layered hoop skirt with puffy sleeves and silks—not something I would wear, not even to a fancy dress ball. Hidden whalebone stays were clamped around my ribs, and making it difficult for me to breathe. Smoke from the funeral pyre filled my nose and mouth.
"I'm—coming to—get you," I managed to tell Anton. It might have been more intimidating if I hadn't been gagging for air while I spoke.
"And when you do," he said. "We'll have another party, far grander and more memorable than this one. This little celebration of death will seem as boring as a church tea. There will be bonfires to the horizon, Ellie." He squeezed my hand, pulling me close, his breath like hot cinders. "There will be a fire to embrace the whole city. Nothing less could express my joy on the night we are finally together."
He leaned forward as if to kiss me, and I awoke in my bed, hot and sweaty. I felt sick and ran to the bathroom and emptied out whatever I'd eaten in the past eight hours or so.
Then I sat on the cool bathroom tiles, rested my head against the wall, and waited until the worst of the sick feeling passed.
I thought about what Nicholas had said, that the living and the dead were at war, and most people didn't even know it. Maybe he was right. I hoped Anton's threat was an exaggeration. He couldn't possibly burn the whole city down. I mean, most of it is up to modern fire code by now, surely. It was a threat meant to frighten me—just like the vision of Michael's funeral, which Anton had treated like a party.
I tried not to think about it as I got ready for work. There were other ghosts to grab tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"So...the bench is haunted?" Hayden asked, scratching his scalp through his curly black man-perm. "I thought the ghost was upstair
s."
"The whole house is haunted," I said. The four of us—Hayden and I, plus Stacey and Nicholas—stood near the base of the stairs. Night had just fallen outside. "The ghosts I want to wake up like to converge on that bench."
"Okey-dokey." Hayden began opening hefty black cases of gear. Stacey wrinkled her nose as he unpacked—several items were covered in what looked like dried peanut-butter fingerprints. "You got your industrial-strength negative ion generator, pushing those little suckers out at a billion per cubic centimeter..." He set up a heavy metallic box with a grate on the front and adjusted its tripod legs until it was pointed at the dead center of the bench. "Got your EMF field generator, cycling through a range of frequencies where we've had the most entity response...and as a bonus, we'll be running this infrasound box broadcasting at an alternating range of frequencies around twenty hertz, which seems to be the sweet spot for helping manifestation, if it does help at all...Hey, is there a Krystal's around here? Do you guys like Krystal? You know, with the mini-burgers and chili cheese pups?"
"Get those set up, and you can spend the rest of the night at Krystal if you want," I said.
"Seriously?" Hayden cast a hopeful look at Nicholas, who just shook his head.
Stacey and I watched closely as he plugged it all into a massive black uninterruptible power supply tower. "In case you've got a Mike Myers," he explained.
"What's that?" Stacey asked. "A guy who won't stop doing Austin Powers impressions?"
"What are you...? No. The guy who stalks teenagers in a clown mask."
"Michael Myers," Stacey said. "Big difference."
"The point is, you might have a bad guy who shorts out your power and stalks you in the dark. With this baby, it doesn't matter at all. You've still got power." Hayden kicked the black steel box, then winced a little and tried to hide it.
"But we're not plugging lights into that. Right?" Stacey asked.
"Au contraire." Hayden broke out a couple of floods and set them up on their stands. "Whole light, ten thousand lumens each—anything stronger would burn your clients' lovely antique house right to the ground."
"Don't turn those on," I said. "At all. They're still a fire hazard."
"They're just back-up, in case the ghoulies get nasty."
"You've...done a great job here, actually." I looked over the oddball array of devices pointed at the bench, ready to encourage ghostly manifestations with beacons of sound and energy. I hoped it worked. I gave Hoff sort of an awkward punch in the arm, in a friendly way, I think.
"Yeah, I do more than just drive the van, believe it or not," he said, looking annoyed.
"He also makes tea. Badly." Nicholas had been standing aside, looking around the library room that was still under construction. He wore a detached, haughty expression on his face, the aristocratic landlord watching the servants labor.
"It's called coffee. I make coffee." Hayden checked his connections.
"Your choice of beans over leaves is only the first mistake in your process, but far from the only one."
"All right, boys," I said. "Before you get into a big catfight over beverages, could you give us a hand with those stampers? We need both of them upstairs..." I gave them the best smile I could conjure.
Stacey and I looked at Nicholas, who made a very slight nod at Hayden, who sighed and trudged outside.
"You're not helping him?" I asked Nicholas.
"I'm not wearing the proper footwear. Now, let's review this plan of yours." Nicholas rejoined us in the entrance hall now that the gear was set up.
"We'll set traps in the nursery and also the upstairs hall, between the nursery and the stairs. When we switch on the gear downstairs, and hopefully get all the little-kid ghosts charged up and active, that could draw Mati out of the nursery and toward the front stairs."
"Away from her preferred lair and onto more neutral ground," Nicholas said.
"Right. While she's drawn out to the stairs by the ghosts of the children, Stacey and I will move into the nursery. If the traps out here don't get Mati, we'll be there to block her retreat and steer her into another trap."
"Sounds a bit dangerous."
"We'll be safe enough. She mainly attacks kids." That wasn't exactly true, but I didn't want Nicholas upstairs with us for the big event. I hadn't exactly provided him with all the critical information, either. "What we need is one person in the van watching the house for surprises, and then another down here to switch the ghost-manifestation array on and off the moment we need it."
"Clearly, you and I should be in the nursery upstairs, Ellie," Nicholas said. "Hayden should operate the array downstairs, and Stacey should stay out in the van with the monitors."
Um...no. That was not my plan. "Nicholas, while I appreciate your chivalry—"
"It's nothing to do with chivalry. I want to see the job is done properly."
"Well, thanks for making that clear. The problem is..." I hurried to come up with something to keep him away. "We really need to lure the ghost out, right? She's more accustomed to Stacey and I poking around by now, but if there's someone new up there tonight, especially a male someone..."
"It could make things go a bit hinky-dinky," Nicholas said.
"That's pretty far from the word choice I was heading toward, but yeah. We don't need a bunch of strangers hanging around, giving Mati's ghost any reason to keep herself hidden. But honestly..." I waited until Hayden had climbed the stairs, huffing and puffing as he carried the first heavy stamper up there. I lowered my voice. "I'd like to have you in the house with us, Nicholas. Operating the array. While your buddy can stay outside."
"He doesn't inspire confidence?" Nicholas asked. "While I give you a feeling of being safe and protected?"
"Yeah, don't read too much into it."
"Where do you want this?" Hayden yelled down. Stacey was already jogging up the stairs after him, giving him directions.
It took quite a while to arrange things, and I felt more and more impatient as the hour grew later. The ghosts were more likely to emerge into a dark, quiet house than one where people were dragging around heavy objects while arguing with and complaining about each other. It went on much too long, and I was starting to fear that we would have to wait another night or two for the ghost to creep out again.
By the end of it, we had two traps out in the open hall—one mounted in the stamper, ready to slam shut at a moment's notice. The other trap stood upright with the clamshell device attached so we could remotely close that lid. Both of them had the usual sensors inside. Both of them also had plastic, life-size baby dolls inside, standing upright inside the transparent cylinders, looking out through the dense wire mesh within the ghost traps like infants in cages.
"You ladies have some creepy taste in decorating," Hayden said. "Looks like the lab of a mad scientist. Or maybe a mad pediatrician."
The doll in the trap closest to Hayden opened its mouth and let out a howling cry, as though his comment about creepy baby dolls had hurt its feelings. Hayden jumped, then scurried a few feet away.
Stacey laughed. Okay, everybody laughed, even Nicholas. The horrified look on Hayden's face was pretty priceless.
"What was that? Did you see that?" Hayden drew a full-spectrum flashlight from his belt and pointed it at the doll, which had fallen silent again, innocently clutching its small plastic teddy bear.
"I've got them all rigged," Stacey said. She held up her remote, each button labeled with a number. "The ones in there, too."
Hayden looked into the nursery, where two more babies stood inside two more traps, one of them mounted in the stamper, the other with the slow clamshell attachment, pretty much identical to how we'd set things up in the hall where we stood. "I'm going to have nightmares about this."
"Baby dolls attracted the ghost before," I said. "Hopefully, they'll work again."
"So you could have started with this approach, with the baby dolls in the traps," Nicholas said. "The rest of your investigation was pointless."
"Not exactly. We didn't know what else we would turn up along the way. Sometimes when you get rid of one ghost, you just unleash another one, a ghost that was being held in check by that first ghost. You always want to know the whole situation."
"At least your process has generated quite a lot of billable hours to charge the client," Nicholas said. "It would hardly have been profitable to capture the ghost on the first night of the investigation."
"That wasn't my goal, Nicholas. I'm just thorough. Now let's get to our stations and stay quiet. Hopefully we can make something happen tonight."
"I believe I am the supervising investigator on this case," Nicholas said.
"You have a better idea?"
"No. We should take our stations and remain quiet."
"Are we sure I shouldn't stay inside?" Hayden asked, eyeballing Stacey. "Help keep the ladies safe?"
"Oh, please," Stacey said. "If you're the technical supervisor, you need to be out in the van. Supervising. Technically."
"We need your eyes all over the house," I said. "I've had nasties sneak up on me way too many times." I mostly just wanted him out of the way. Nicholas, too. I had plans of my own to which Nicholas might not have agreed.
"Let's let the ladies have their way for now," Nicholas said. "We'll step in as needed."
"Wow, thanks for the favor," Stacey said.
Eventually, we were arranged the way I wanted. Hayden was out in the van, and Stacey kept asking him why the van didn't talk like on Knight Rider. She'd definitely boned up on her Hasselhoff trivia.
Nicholas was downstairs, ready to blast the manifestation array at the bench, though he kept reminding me there was a good chance it wouldn't actually do anything. It was all experimental, unreliable gear down there. That seemed to fit pretty well with my working relationship with Nicholas so far—experimental and unreliable. He was right where he belonged.
Stacey and I camped out at the back end of the upstairs hall, near the doors to the master bedroom. If things went as planned, the ghost of Mati would emerge from the nursery and head for the stairs, toward the child ghosts that liked to play on the stairs and bench. We were staying well away from that path. Mati would walk right past, or even through, a couple of ghost traps as she approached the top of the stairs.
